I don’t think that they build it by design that it needs a restart for configuration, I assume it was more a negative by-product when developing it, however this is just a guess.
No worries, they care about newcomers :), in fact, in recent version there were a lot of changes in this direction the new UI scene editor, the UI automation editor keeps advancing, more and more integrations can be configured through the UI etc., etc. Keep in mind, home assistant is still in beta status.